Lachlan Mackinnon's third collection, his first for Faber, is haunted by the 1960s. There is a brief elegy for Jerry Garcia, a longer farewell to the Beatles and their last, rooftop gig, and "Bob Dylan's Minnesota Harmonica Sound", which mines the sub-Woody Guthrie bleak railroad-blues imagery that swirls around Dylan's early work. Even a poem that seems to have nothing to do with rock music, an evocation of life down and out in Prague, bears the title of the Doors' "Riders on the Storm".

These exercises in the collective nostalgia of public imagery are matched by elegies for poets and friends, and poems revisiting his early marriage, divorce and old haunts. But Mackinnon isn't a naive elegist, although these poems are all attractive and accessible. Twenty years ago he published a critical book, Eliot, Auden, Lowell: Aspects of the Baudelairean Inheritance, and Baudelaire's influence is still strong in him. Baudelaire's motto was: "anywhere out of the world", meaning that he craved to be wherever he was not and delighted in imagining quasi-real scenes as props for the psyche. Baudelare is the poet of furious imagining:

Strange sport! Where destination has no place or name, and may be anywhere we choose -

where man, committed to his endless race,

runs like a madman diving for repose!

("The Voyage" - Robert Lowell's version)

I imagine that Mackinnon would admit to something similar to "anywhere out of the world" engraved on his heart or pinned to his lapel. In his Baudelairean Inheritance book he says that for Baudelaire: "The reminder of things not immediately present offers an extension of his own being." This could serve as the poetic strategy behind a great many of the poems written today, but, obviously, it is more true for some poets than for others.

Mackinnon lacks Baudelaire's fury, of course, replacing it with a gentle ruefulness - a typically English modulation from the French. The Baudelairean impulse emerges in a poem such as "Prime Numbers" in which the platonic perfection of the prime numbers, "the always-out-there, / prime before they are found // radiant / in darkness", takes on an emblematic physical existence and is juxtaposed with a piece of "real" epiphany, "the tree behind Grandpa Hughes's bench", remembered from childhood, which is also "always-out-there / gnarled, obdurate, / dripping / and shining". You could meditate for a long time on this twinning of an ideal taken from obdurate reality and the reification of the abstract, the prime number as something numinous as a gnarled tree.

The interplay of the real and the processes of the mind is at the heart of Mackinnon's poetry. For to call the tree "gnarled, obdurate, dripping and shining" is to make it a tree of the mind. This image could as easily have been an invention as something described and the excitement of the image is a purely mental act, as much to do with language and human sensuality as it is to do with the object, which does not have to be described in those terms; does not have to described at all and for another observer might not be worth registering.

Imagined elsewheres populate the book. "Marfa, Texas" glosses the sculptures of Donald Judd, finding in them a plea: "There is too little space in this world, / leave us alone, they say, we have nothing to say". The poem ends with a classic paraphrase of the Baudelaire motto:

On hustled days, I think of that place as of a sudden widening of the street-narrowed sky to sweep down to the furthest possible horizon.

Even that Beatles' last gig takes on a transcendent dimension, signalled by the title "On the Roof of the World". They are "playing for God" and even those who merely read about the gig in the papers the next day liked to imagine that they had been there.

The extreme of imagining here is the title poem, in which events in space became domesticated:

Curled like the scrolled end of a chair's arm, swaddled

in dust or gas, the comet's rock or ice heart went to bits in the field of invisible stress around Jupiter.

The description of the gigantic cosmic event in terms of the homely, shapely image of the chair's arm is an example of what Gaston Bachelard called "intimate immensity", the conflation of big things and little that seems, as Nabokov also observed in Speak, Memory, to be inherently poetic: "There is, it would seem, in the dimensional scale of the world, a kind of delicate meeting place between imagination and knowledge, a point, arrived at by diminishing large things, and enlarging small ones, that is intrinsically artistic."

If all this is somewhat metaphysical, one can also say that Mackinnon's interest in French poetry emerges in a more literal way in "Le Cygne", a poem looking back to Mackinnon's divorce. The poem translates itself into French as it goes along and exploits the fact that French sentences are often back to front phrasally when compared to their English counterparts. This enables the French both to rhyme and to translate the English lines (and vice versa). It is far easier to see it than to explain:

The public gardens, after the divorce. Pour soulager, ils étaient trop modernes,

There are two longish sequences: "Pips in a Watermelon" and "A Water-Buffalo in Guangdong Province". The brief tribute to Jerry Garcia perhaps offers a clue to the procedures of the longer poems. This is the Garcia poem, "Not Fade Away", in its entirety:

I play one record then another, Hearing your youth In your later work and your Late economy in your youth's

Profligate, glittering runs.

In Grateful Dead terms, most of these poems represent the concise lyrics of Working Man's Dead but "Pips in a Watermelon" and "A Water-Buffalo in Guangdong Province" are the extended improvisations. Perhaps Mackinnon hopes we shall see the Baudelairean expansion in his short poems and economy in the long workouts but these do sound a bit self-indulgent, a bit Gary Snyder, to reach for a poetic equivalent of the Grateful Dead.

"A Water-Buffalo in Guangdong Province" takes off from an image of the animal emerging unbidden when the author saw a flooded copse in England. Such a remote and precise image is just the sort of thing to get the Baudelairean imagination going but the poem seems notebookish and Californian-Zen rather than Intimate-Immense:

mind's restless

quest for what holds may figure thought as aiming at a place beyond change...

"Pips in a Water Melon" is more home-grown, with anguished English imagery à la Geoffrey Hill and Eliot's Four Quartets.

Among contemporary poets, Mackinnon's work has most in common with such figures as Michael Hofmann and Jamie McKendrick - learned, interested in foreign poetry, but also with roots in pop culture - who smuggle a fine sensibility through a coarse age. But poetry quite as philosophical as Mackinnon's has long been out of fashion. A poet with such a yen needs to balance it with a zest for the real - those gnarled trees - and the balancing act has rarely been achieved as well as it is here.